Howdy everyone!
For the last few days I've been working on setting up our games biomes and some basic biome interaction, check out the following WIP images of our biomes so far!
Biome spawning and layout
To spawn the biomes into the game world, I've taken a "temperature" + "wetness" approach so far, and its giving quite decent results. Basically, the further from the equator of the map you are, the colder the temperature gets, and the further inland you are, the dryer the map gets - multiplying these two together allows us to determine which biome you're in.
The biome layout, their flora, and fauna all spawn procedurally, and so will be totally different based on your map seed. Right now this map seed isn't exposed to the player - but we see no reason why not to expose that in the future :)
My goal is to hopefully ensure that pretty much every map seed has a good variation and scattering of biomes, as well as their sizes. Right now the generator needs a little more work - because a lot of seeds end up simply generating heaps of open and empty ocean :(.
Macro level world
A continental shelf, approx 4+km wide ingame.
You can clearly see the biome separations here, between the central hot climates, and then the more temperate climates as you head north or south - ending with boreal and tundra biomes at the edges of the map.
World overview.
Temperate Forest
Forest flora
Grass is incredibly thick and tall in the forest biome. The sun is blocked by the above tree canopy, and the density of lumber and smaller forgeable bushes is crazy high.
The forest is a bountiful place - plenty of forgeable food can be found there in the form of berries, mushrooms etc - but it is also the home to most of the games animals, so by virtue will be quite dangerous.
Forest fauna
Wolves, bears, boar, and deer, can all be found in the forest biome. Every so often, the game world checks to see if the player is in a particular biome, and attempts to spawn an animal around them.
The animal needs enough free space from other animals and humans in order to succeed in spawning - and different animals have different chances to spawn. For example, chickens are far more common then wolves are, and bears are exceptionally rare.
Grasslands
Grasslands flora
The grasslands are a deceptively simple biome. It doesn't really provide many naturally found resources in the way of forgeable or harvestable plants, there are however some flowers that can be plucked for use in late game dyes.
However, it makes up for that in its geography - providing excellent places to build, and fertile lands to farm. It mostly shines as a fauna based biome.
Grasslands fauna
The grasslands are home to the grazing animals. Bison, horses, rabbits, chickens, etc. I've set up the grass biomes to be not particularly rewarding, but not particularly threatening either.
In fair weather, you should be able to survive in a grass biome just fine, but without lumber to build a shelter, and without a long term food option, its going to be hard to survive without leaving the grasslands biome.
Eventually, you will be able to return to the grasslands in order to tame a worthwhile horse, or to domesticate sheep, goats, and other grazers.
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Currently, the below biomes haven't much/any content developed for them, but I'll follow this dev blog up in the near future with what content we're going to be putting into these other biomes - and what makes them unique from the other more temperate biomes:
Plains
Currently, the plains only spawn the odd tree, as well as some grass for animals to graze. So I'm going to be updating this biome pretty substantially in the near future as I figure out exactly what belongs to this biome in terms of gameplay.
Desert
Our initial thoughts for the desert were to make it an abundant source of natural minerals, like iron, and copper - etc, along with salt, and potentially some other naturally occurring spices used in late game recipes and foods.
Boreal forest
A southern ice shelf continent. White = Tundra, Dark green = Boreal forest
Probably the most 'extreme' environment that a player will actually manage to survive in long term. Exactly what the boreal forests offer players when compared to more temperate areas is yet to be determined.
Tundra
The goal with tundra is mainly to ensure players aren't able to venture outside of the world. The idea being that "survival" in the tundra is basically impossible.
We haven't thought too much about the tundra biome, but as we work on it, we will update you all in a future post.
Wetlands
Lastly, the map doesn't spawn proper "rivers" or "lakes" yet - but that's something I'm going to be exploring in the near future. I want to create a specific biome that exists around bodies of water, flowing rivers, etc, that provides an abundance of fishing opportunities as well as some bears opportunistically hunting in the rivers.
Hopefully, if we do our job right, our players will find ample areas that provide either strong tactical position, challenging gameplay, or fun roleplay opportunities throughout our biomes for founding towns and cities.
Alright well that's everything for the biome update so far! We still have lots of other extra content to show off, but we're going to detail that in dedicated posts rather then lumping them all in together. Also - I'll make sure to follow up with a biomes pt2 post when the other areas are more fleshed out, so stay tuned!
Follow along the development!
Remember as always, if you want to influence the direction of the game, then please either jump in the discord and come say hi, or feel free to post in the steam community!
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